“But for me, I had to know I knew it first – I had to feel”
A Conversation with Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde1
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By way of an introduction.
A few weeks ago, I was in the school playground waiting for my little one to come out at the end of the day. A bear-like friend of mine came around the corner, looking full of life-energy. Holding his hands wide, he expressed full force to me:
“We are not what we think we are.”
“I know.” I said, “We are the fruiting body of universal energy, just like the mushroom is the fruiting body of the mycelium”.
As our children arrived, the energy dissipated, until we found ourselves once more in conversation in the park. Our conversation had gone onto the elements, earth, air, water, fire, and how they relate in some ways to our experience of being.2 Bear-like friend asked me which element I feel most comfortable in. Water is what I replied.
I love to be in water. My body feels so easy, moves so well. Some days when I’m in the sea dipping, and the sun shines a bright path of light over the surface of the water, I feel like I could swim on forever. I feel like Seal, like I have found my pelt. I resolved to find ways to feel like I do in water whilst on land, swimming in the air.
This quality of our being, able to shift our perceptions to alter our experience, often in response to learning, feels magical to me. I enjoy exploring the mysteries of life, lived through each new day.
Bear-like friends’ insight in that moment had been around dropping the mask of the ego, which is nothing more than an illusion which keeps us isolated and disconnected from the whole. He is asking “if I dissolve the ego and there is no sense of self, then who am I? If I am one with everything, because everything is interconnected, then how do I feel that. Having a sense of self is important…when you look at nature, trees, flowers, mushrooms, they all grow and they all have some sense of purpose.”
My permaculture learning has got me to a place where I see our purpose as being to make a contribution to life's unfolding. That's it. We are just supposed to grow, like the trees, flowers and mushrooms.
In a recent Being Earthbound podcast, Dan MacTiernan was talking with Jessica Bockler from the Alef Trust about how consciousness flows through us. Our bodies then are a pattern of energy moving through the flow of consciousness as it arises. So who am I? Where do I end and you begin? What is our capacity for sapience - the world sensing itself? How do we hold ourselves together to act in the world in light of our permeable boundaries? What does this mean for us in terms of how social change happens?
I have been holding a question about what it might mean to become indigenous to place, to become animal. Inspired by the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, and other learnings I have happened upon in the past couple of years.
I see that this inquiry exists on two distinct levels. The outer relationship with the place in which I find myself, and the inner. I see that the beginning of the process of becoming animal is to come into good relationship with, and to feel at home in my body.
Through the process of a recent permaculture design, I have identified key areas where I could begin to make shifts in how I am living in order to feel my way into better relationship with my body. It’s been about cultural conditioning, releasing old patterns and creating new, more healthful ones.
The quest to become indigenous to place, to become animal, is a frame, a way of looking and perceiving as I learn more about what it might mean to tread more lightly on earth, reducing my impact, and articulating what I am doing to create an alternative future, now.
Recently, I was watching a recording of the Planet Local Summit.3 The session with Darcia Narvaez on her work around The Evolved Nest was being introduced by Alnoor Ladha, his words about our deep entanglement tugged deeply at my being.
“Quantum physics is teaching us that we are more like space time becomings, than beings. Our particles are entangled with other particles in non-local ways. Our very notion of separation is being blurred and queered. Evolutionary biology is teaching us that we are primarily made up of bacteria, so, who is the us? Then even the safe areas of ‘we are our thoughts’, ‘we are our ideas’, what we are learning is that we are highly sensitive, contextually dependent beings. That even the food that we are eating is determining our thoughts through the vagal nerves. So it’s the bacteria in our gut that is determining our thinking. There’s no safe place left for the idea of us. We are a congress of beings, and becomings, simultaneously.”
x
For the past four years, I have been immersing my self in learning about permaculture design. I have been holding a further question, for a longer time ‘what would a systems and complexity approach to social change entail?’ This question emerged during a period of working on delivering a Transition Towns project, through which I learnt that Transition had grown out of Permaculture. I was intrigued by permaculture, curious. Permaculture design seemed to me to be a good way to learn more, because as I saw it then, it exists at the intersection of whole-systems thinking, ethics and design.
I have just submitted design 10 of 10 for assessment in pursuit of a Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design with the Permaculture Association. I come to the end of my diploma with doubts and questions about permaculture design, which I am certain will surface in the course of my writing.
At the same time, I come to the end having had a rich and diverse learning experience which has opened up my thinking in ways I could not have predicted. And I have found love in connection with many wonderful people who are involved in the movement. I have sensed that there are possibilities within permaculture design, but for them to ripen now, my feeling is that permaculture design needs to evolve.
So, I am holding onto the tension created in that contradiction in my experience.
Through the process of getting myself to the end of this period of study, I have surfaced a number of insights into what it might mean to become indigenous to place, to become animal.
Living Stories, Living Worlds offers a medium for further inquiry, beyond the structure of formal learning.
At this moment, becoming indigenous to place, becoming animal might mean:
Meeting the needs of our family as much as possible from our local area
Taking good care of my body, meeting my needs for nourishment, self-care, learning, connection, creativity and play, creating a culture of care for my self
Finding ways to heal in community
Finding ways to release patterns that feel like they occlude my sensing of the subtle energies in the web of life
Setting a fire at each turn of the Wheel of the Year, inviting others to share that intention with me
Making time to ‘be’ in the woods and the sea
It’s about recalibrating my worldview, provoking a shift in perspective, to re-learn how to hear the universe as living being and come to embody my place in the cosmos.
As is the way of things when dancing with complexity more questions arise, that will be useful on the journey ahead:
How do I embed myself more deeply in the living world, experiencing my self as part of it?
How do I design for emergence? How do I create conditions conducive to life?
How do I get a good livelihood for my self from all this work?
What’s the problem with ‘the problem is the solution’?
Why does the idea of ‘mimicking nature’ fall on me with such difficulty?
I was talking about my project to write about what it might mean to become indigenous with a fellow permaculture student. She said that, coincidentally enough, a year or so ago she had found herself holding a similar question. I like the frame of it:
“How do I regain my original indigenous way of being in the world?”
For me, the call in response is to come back into relationship with the traditions of the place I call home.
As I finish writing this, my first attempt at articulating all that’s bubbling and boiling over in my being, for I feel a yearning to write so deeply, it almost hurts, I feel drawn to acknowledge that here in some parts of Wales there is a tradition of celebrating New Year on January 13th.
Hen Galan is a celebration where we find we are still holding remnants of the old ways, a different way to account for time, and a site of resistance to moving from the Julian calendar (which was controversially abolished in 1752) to the Gregorian calendar. This tradition is held in a place in West Wales called Cwm Gwaun. On the day, children go door to door singing, and are given ‘calennig’, sweets or money in return.
On the 13th January this year, I will travel with a friend to Llanwonno, on a pilgrimage of sorts to meet with my grandmother’s grandmother. A woman called Ellen, who signed her name with a cross, who lived on the land by St Gwynno’s Church, a sacred well and the Clydach river, in a row of terraces no longer there.
I shall make an intention bundle, a gift and a letter to my grandmother’s grandmother. And I’ll leave it somewhere, to tie a knot in the thread of my connection to my ancestor, to hold her dear. Then I’ll carry that thread with me, back to the sea here in Penarth, which is where the waters from Llanwonno emerge after their meandering journey, where the Clydach meets the Taff, and moves through Cardiff Bay into the Severn’s estuarine sea.
The waters in which I swim.
Lorde, Audre, and Adrienne Rich. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Signs, vol. 6, no. 4, 1981, pp. 713–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739. Accessed 1 Jan. 2024.
Earth/body/ground, Air/ideas, Fire/energy and Water/emotion
Planet Local Summit Livestream Friday 29 September. From 1:23:45 onwards.